Why can’t Android phones just upgrade to the next Android version and let the user decide if the version is too slow for their phone and revert to the previous version as there are many phones with good hardware that could still run Android 10 but stuck now at 8 or 9?

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Why can’t Android phones just upgrade to the next Android version and let the user decide if the version is too slow for their phone and revert to the previous version as there are many phones with good hardware that could still run Android 10 but stuck now at 8 or 9?

In: Technology

5 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Rule 6.

r/androidquestions might know better.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Because Android phone manufactures make money only when they sell you a physical unit – they make no money off software.

If they keep alowing for updates then people would stick longer with their older hardware and sales would be bad.

Only reason apple is making ios updates for older devices is because they make a lot money on the app store.

Anonymous 0 Comments

That’s because Android phone manufacturers use different parts from different brands to manufacture each and every model. Every Android phone has different motherboards, processors (CPU and GPU), sound cards, cameras etc. And these parts require special software called “driver” to be able to communicate with the operating system. Some of these parts can work with every update to the OS with their initial driver, but some of them need their driver to be updated to work with the newer OS. A basic example of this would be when old printers that worked fine with Windows XP stop working with Windows 10. That’s because the driver of the printer was designed to work with XP, and Windows 10 have different rules of communication than XP that can’t be fulfilled by that old driver. So phone manufacturers have to manually update the driver software of some of the parts in their phones and sometimes they find the effort not worth it based on the number of active users for that phone.

In short, if the phone manufacturers pushed the newer Android immediately to every one of their devices without updating the drivers for some of the parts in their phones, then most of the phones would stop working altogether, they would crash, or you wouldn’t be able to use some of the phone’s functionality. And this would be a disaster for the brand. **The reason they’re not pushing the newer Android to every model is not that the update would slow down your device, it’s because the update would break your device and result in malfunction.** (In fairness though, Android updates almost always slow down the entry & mid-level phones with generic Chinese CPUs, but that’s not the motivation behind why manufacturers don’t want to update your phone to the newest Android.)

Edit: grammar

Anonymous 0 Comments

There are several stages for an upgrade to occur.

First, Google writes the new version of Android, tastefully called Sugar Shack.

Second, Samsung, for example, takes the new Android version and adapts it to as many of their phone as the think will need it, ignoring ones too old to be concerned about. (They want new sales and supporting old hardware is persuading many to skip upgrading to the latest and greatest and most profitible.

Third, Verizon, for example, takes the release which Samsung (and other hardware vendors) have adapted to various models they’ve decided to support and adapts it to their network, ignoring the lack of profit from new sales at their Verizon (or T-Mobil, or other) stores.

Fourth, you decide that you can limp along with the old hardware and fail to support the industry with your excess cash which they need and you clearly do not. (/sarcasm)